


mushrooms, rings, and broken things

by VerdantMoth



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Agender Character, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Canon Disabled Character, Curse Breaking, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Deaf Clint Barton, Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Style, Getting Together, Getting to Know Each Other, I do what I want, I don’t play well with lore, M/M, Mentions of Wartimes, The author only vaguely apologizes for this okay, don’t question the magic just accept it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 16:03:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19232428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: Ta must read minds because James is handed a spoon. “You’ve already drunk our water, Little Soldier. If those stories were true you’re already screwed.”He takes the spoon with a scowl, “Stop callin’ me Little.”“You gonna tell us your name?” Clint asks. James jerks, hot stew sloshing across his green-bandaged chest. “‘Cause your shirt was torn and I’m pretty certain your name isn’t ‘Barr.’”James ponders, and takes a bite of stew. It’s spicy, thick, and it settles comfortably in his belly. He’s not convinced about anything they say, but his mom was superstitious. Even if the food thing isn’t real, James knows the power of names. “Bucky,” he settles on. It’s not quite a lie.





	mushrooms, rings, and broken things

James doesn’t know where they are. He’s sure someone yelled at them, gave them a location while they spent days and weeks marching. Mostly though, all he sees is miles and miles of rolling green and jagged cliff edge. And grey skies.

He hasn’t seen the fucking sun in weeks. He’s not supposed to be out of the trenches, to be wandering, but he’s stiff and sore and he _needs_ a break from Rhodey and Steve’s relentless flirting.

He hears the whistle, low and heavy, and looks around. There’s no covering. Nothing but a lopsided ring of mushrooms that makes him hesitate, a split second. All the soldiers’ve heard rumors of what happens in the fairy rings. They don’t believe them, exactly. But in war a soldier doesn't risk more than he must, than he already is.

Besides. He’s never seen on that was so broken, so… almost oval.

He doesn’t get to make the choice. The bomb tears through him, and he falls into the fungus ring, his whole left side the wrong kind of burning.

Before he passes out, before the pain rips him from consciousness, James _swears_ he sees fiery-red hair and sunny-gold hair, two impossible creatures standing over him. They touch him, his shoulder, and something a bit like liquid ecstasy, too hot, too heavy courses through him and he’s glad to sink into the black.

—

James wakes in fits and starts and hazy dreams that feel like ripped flesh and burning pain and taste like honey sweetened cold liquid.

Flashes of golden hay and explosion red loom in and out of his visions, and he hears two voices that make his skull split. One high, one low, both a weird tinkling, raspy sound, like delicate bells drug across gravel roads.

One voice isn’t quite right but he can explain it. “Ta, we can’t keep him.”

“Oh, but Clint, he’s already here.”

He drifts.

“He’s not like your other pets. He’s…”

“He’s what?”

“Not soft. Not delicate. You saw him out there, Ta, he rips his own apart.”

“They all do beyond our ring. They’re fighting a war. Like we did.”

“They’re winning.”

It makes no sense James, these broken fragment-exchanges.

Sometimes he only hears the high voice, Ta. He opens his head and the world's too bright and the other one, Clint with the golden-hay hair moves his hands, he’s using finger-speak. Sign language, but nothing James has ever seen. Literal images bound from his fingers.

He has to shut his eyes for fear his brain might leak from his nose.

Sometimes, when he can feel night and the warmth of a fire and taste honey-cold, he cracks his eyes.

They’re not like the Fae folk people of this area described. Sure, there’s definitely an ethereal beauty, sharpness about their looks, but if it weren’t for the intricate, _incandescent,_  patterns on their skin, for the sharply curved ears and unnaturally colored hair and eyes… they could be natives.

Sometimes the fire catches on Clint, his shortly cropped hair and his ears, delicately, mangled things

Someone hurt him, someone tried to… to, to carve his ears?

James pukes then, at the thought. He tries to roll over to his left side and he nearly screams, definitely hisses at the pain that explodes. At the arm he can’t feel.

There’s a set of hands on him, unnaturally cold but soft, and _Clint_ is above him. “Hey, hey pal, don’t try and move. You took a ton of damage and you’re still healing.”

James doesn’t so much as pass out as willingly and gracefully slink into the black peace of slumber once more. Right before he sinks though, soft fingers touch his left side, and that silvery, liquidy, _ecstasy_ feeling slinks through him.

—

The next time James wakes, the world haze gone twilight hazy; golden edges and blue centers and purple rings. It’s beautiful, and it reminds James of that one time in Paris. The club, the one with a brick door and the soup that smelled as bad as it tasted and the pulsing music and lights that he could _feel_ after a bit.

This doesn’t have the blurry edges of the drug-stew though. This feels real in a way that _can’t_ be real, and James almost wants to be back in that seedy club, back in the bathroom with a guy who might’ve had purple eyes but definitely had a gifted mouth.

It reminds him he has no clue where he is, and that makes him jerk upright.

He’s alone, no warm fire, no strange voices, and he aches.

James can feel something wrong on his left side. Something that makes him afraid to look. He does. His stomach rolls even as his brain struggles to process the strips of… green bandage across his chest, his shoulder.

The stump where his shoulder should be.

James reaches with his right hand, and it’s quickly batted away. He flinches, hard, swings wildly, but the golden-hay man dances away sprightly. He wiggles a long, thick finger at James. “Wouldn’t touch that if I were you. Still healing, and the infection might get nasty.”

The accent is… off. James has travelled most of Europe blowing shit up and he couldn’t even begin to guess where this guy was from.

“Your voice sounds like bells against gravel,” James says helpfully.

The guy laughs, soft at first, and then it builds and James thinks about that club again as the sound wraps around him, makes him drowsy. _Clint_ , James’ dreams remind him.

“Sleep, little soldier,” Clint says and James frowns. He’s not stood up to compare, but he’s pretty sure he’s taller.

“I’ve been sleeping,” he says instead. “For how long?”

Clint tilts his head, furrows his brows. He looks like he’s counting, and then he pauses, counts again, and shrugs. “In your time, who knows. A week? A year?” He waves a hand absently. “But only three days for me.”

James leans back on his right elbow, mumbling to himself.

Clint leans in, “Sorry? Can’t hear you, and you moved your lips from my line of sight.”

That’s the first thing that’s made sense since James woke up and he says, with a heavy sigh, “They’re going to be so mad I left my post.”

“They’ve already left the area,” another voice says, and James turns as fast as he can, to see the fire-crown, Ta, slinking from between the trees.

“No,” he says. “They wouldn’t’ve moved that fast.”

Ta shrugs, something mischievous in moss colored eyes, “They were motivated.”

Clint frowns and moves his hands, and light springs from those thick fingers in images too fast for James’ eyes. Ta bares sharp teeth and Clint and says, “He was going to find out eventually.”

“No,” James insist. “Steve wouldn’t’ve left me behind. Rhodey might’ve, but ain’t no way Steve Rogers would have left and not gone looking for me first.”

Ta’s moss-eyes soften, plump lips curling into a frown. “Little Soldier, they did look. And what do you think they found outside our ring?”

James feels fire through his left side, and he curls in on himself, lets them touch him with liquid ecstasy that sends him into kaleidoscope dreams.

—

The next time James wakes, he does so slowly, and to the smell of spiced meats. Ta hands him a bowl of stew, thick and full of meat and carrots and he takes it. He glances at the outfits Clint and Ta wear, have been wearing, for as long as he can recall. All black leather and tight, straps across their chest and sturdy boots. They could almost be soldiers in their own right, with outfits like that, and he’s half disappointed they aren’t flouncing around in green leggins and shift tops.

He doesn’t eat the stew. He’s trying to remember the rules about eating their food. There’s an exchange, maybe. An offering? All he knows, all he can remember is you _never_ accept a gift from the fae-folk. Take nothing for free.

Ta must read minds because James is handed a spoon. “You’ve already drunk our water, Little Soldier. If those stories were true you’re already screwed.”

He takes the spoon with a scowl, “Stop callin’ me Little.”

“You gonna tell us your name?” Clint asks. James jerks, hot stew sloshing across his green-bandaged chest. “‘Cause your shirt was torn and I’m pretty certain your name isn’t ‘Barr.’”

James ponders, and takes a bite of stew. It’s spicy, thick, and it settles comfortably in his belly. He’s not convinced about anything they say, but his mom was superstitious. Even if the food thing isn’t real, James knows the power of names. “Bucky,” he settles on. It’s not quite a lie.

Ta smirks. Clint shrugs. “Smart Little Soldier. You know the rule about names.”

Blue eyes flash like black-ice and he’s treated to a feral grin with sharp teeth, “But, Little Soldier, the name you’re gifted at birth doesn’t always turn out to be your true name.”

James shudders, for reasons he can’t explain, and tinkling, gravel-crunch laughter echoes around him.

He eats in silence. It’s a complicated process, trying to eat one handed. This is also the first time he’s been awake for more than a brief moment, and his whole body aches. Even the parts of him that can’t anymore.

He grimaces, and Ta reaches slender fingers towards him but he shakes his head. Clint frowns and he shrugs. “Makes me sleepy, and ‘m tired of sleeping.”

Ta frowns. “Sleeping is how you heal. Sleeping and honey water and magic.”

James snorts. “Magic, right.”

Clint moves his fingers, light bouncing from them. Golden tendrils wrap around him and he can see small creatures with glitter-dust wings and ugly little things with gnarled faces and creatures that look more like what he imagined a fairy would.

“So you learned some cool tricks,” James says. Ta sinks to their heels in front of him, head tilted. They don’t say anything. But slender fingers tap James’ shoulder and he drops his bowl and grits his teeth to stop from screaming.

“Our ‘cool tricks’ keep the pain at bay,” Ta chides him. When Ta takes their hand back, the pain recedes with it and James leans over, sucking air through his teeth.

“Cruel,” he hisses.

Clint clicks his teeth. “Whatever you say, Buck.”

They vanish, quick steps and shadows in the tree, leaving him there alone. The pain blooms again and he bites his right wrist to keep silent, angry at these creatures who keep him captive and play tricks with his body.

—

They don’t come back for what feels like a long time to James. But the sun has barely moved in the sky, lighting it up in pinks and oranges when Ta and Clint come back. They look tired. Bruised. Ta is bleeding from a cut on their cheek and Clint’s lip looks swollen. James frowns and opens his mouth, but they ignore him and move right into the trees on the other side of the clearing. He contains his disappointment, but only barely.

He’s hungry, and he hurts, and he’s a little bored.

James decides to follow them. He doesn’t bother trying to be quiet. He knows, somehow, that he never could be quiet enough to hide from Ta and Clint.

They move gracefully, weaving in and out of the trees and James has a hard time keeping up. Or he would if it weren’t for red and gold threads of light braiding between the branches.

They weren’t wrong about time inside the ring. He can’t explain it, how they’ve been bounding through a forest that goes on forever, and yet the sun never seems to move.

He’s flagging, growing tired, when he hears the music. He perks up immediately, because he’s _heard this song before._

“I told you Steve,” he hisses, forgetting for a moment. “I told you there was music in these woods.”

He breaks through the forest into a clearing. An actual clearing, not just an empty patch like the one before. There are fires, lots of them, in impossible colors, and so many bodies swaying. He doesn’t know where the music comes from. It comes from everywhere and from nowhere all at once and he’s back in Paris, for just a moment.

James startles, trips over himself. “I don’t like it here,” he announces, mostly to himself. Or so he thought.

The music screeches off, a million spotlight eyes in rainbow colors staring at him. He stands very still. Ta and Clint are at his side, appearing quietly and suddenly, stares intense. “Rude,” Ta reprimands. “To be so ungrateful for our hospitality.”

He narrows his eyes. “I want to go home. I want to go back to Steve and Rhodey and I want,” he hesitates. He’s homesick all of a sudden. Aches for the soot of Brooklyn and the tiny box he shares with his Ma and Sister. He wants things he hadn’t known he’d missed, in the muddy trenches ducking a spray of bullets.

He wants oranges and wool socks and the stray cat with one ear and a wonky eye.

“You can’t go back,” Clint says. There’s something almost petulant in his tone. “They can’t know that we’re here.”

“And why not?” James demands.

“Because you’ll expose us,” Ta informs him.

James arches a brow. “I mean, you’re basically myth anyway.”

Several heads turn at that, a flurry of whispers that scratch at James’ ears and make him sink to his knees.

“No,” Clint hisses. “We saw you hesitate outside our ring.”

James gives a careless, one-armed shrug. “Well, yeah. I mean, my Ma is very superstitious so even if a thing might not be true, best not to mess with it.”

Ta and Clint take off again, and the music starts up slowly, mournful. The bodies move, half-sways that reek of a strange, lethargic desperation James can feel deep in his bones.

God, but he’s sick of being tired.

—

Ta and Clint abandon him for thirty-one sun cycles. James doesn’t call them days. They don’t _feel_ like days. They feel like dreams and years and memories. They come back and they look more tired than he thought they could, than any human ever could, and then they leave again, completely ignoring him.

Occasionally, the others offer him food. A tiny wasp of a thing with dark curls and big eyes, who moves in sideways skittering. He’s always trailed by a man whose skin gleams like metal, whose eyes are coal-fire.

Sometimes is a dainty girl who manages to be half James’ size and twice as intimidating. She doesn’t ever really _walk_ towards him. She, he can’t explain it, but she _hovers_ and then she’s beside him.

They ply him with meat that’s tender and veggies that are spicy and cakes that are sweet. He’s always hungry here.

Always thirsty for the water that’s always honey-sweet and winter-cold.

They don’t speak to him though. They hum, melodies that sound older than the forest and lull him into a trance. But they never speak to him.

When the little one dances towards him, James reaches for his wrist. “What is your name?” He asks. The kid smiles, small, growing, _feral_ because all their smiles are. “Names are important, Bucky Barr. Shan’t give a name unless you know what’s behind it.”

James frowns. Fuckin’ cryptic creatures. “So then how should I refer to you? To any of you?”

The kid’s grin brightens. “Why, by our names, of course!” He flits away from James then, leaving him confused.

—

When the girl appears beside him, handing over a plate with bread and gravy, James asks, “When will they return?”

She says nothing. Her stare is intense, like she’s reading things he didn’t know she could. Memories, of Rhodey and Steve, of the searing pain. Of Ma, his sister. The cat. He places his one hand to his head, trying to contain the building pressure. The girl tugs, yanks at his memories, until she finds Ta and Clint.

“They’re doing recon,” she says. The word comes out foriegn in her mouth, and he knows that she stole it from his past.

“When will they return?” He demands.

She smiles, tugs at his thoughts until the word “names” screams in a million different voices and times and memories. “Whenever you asks,” she says.

The boy comes over then, and the girl leaves, and James says, “Gonna call that one the Dream-Stealer.”

The boy grins, “A gift from the Little Soldier. Perhaps the first of many.”

James blinks at him. “Bucky,” he says. “I told the others to call me Bucky.”

The kid tilts his head, skittering like a bug, and he curls his fingers, creating a web of light that shimmers. It spells his name, his _given_ name, which makes Bucky uncomfortable. “And you, little Orb-Weaver, Name-thief.” He curls his right hand over the kid’s fingers. “Keep that shit to yourself.”

The kid just laughs and bounces away.

—

He wants them back. Which “them,” James doesn’t even know anymore, but he’s lonely, and none of these people _talk_ to him. They talk at him, around him. Whisper in tongues that may or may not be real, but James is _lonely_.

He’s healing well though. He doesn’t think much about the green-leaf bandages that refresh themselves every time he sleeps, or about the empty space at his left side. The scaring though, the few times he’s dared look.

If scars really do entice lovers, James’ll be rolling in them.

There’s very little to do in the forest. He can run, if he doesn’t mind the branches whipping at his cheeks.

It’s about the only exercise he can do now.

Orb-Weaver and Dream-Stealer sometimes linger near him. They watch him, watch the way he moves awkwardly and off-balance. They whisper to each other, high noises that sometimes make James’ eyes water.

One day, they bring the man over. His skin shifts, seems alive in a way that skin shouldn’t, red and gold and deep beneath the surface, blue.

“They tell me you’re in need,” He says to James.

“Of what?”

The man shrugs, “That’s up to you to tell me.”

James narrows his eyes, tilts his head forward. His hair has grown, long enough that he’s startled. “Well I could use a hair cut,” he snarks.

The man laughs. “Is that really what you want?”

James sighs. No, it’s not. But he doesn’t know what he wants anymore, except to have use of his other arm again. Instead he says, “Maybe a decent shave instead.”

The man laughs as he walks away.

—

He wakes up, 72-sun cycles after Ta and Clint left the second time, screaming for them. There’s a fire in his veins, one that weighs on his left side most heavily, and he’s sweating, despite the cool air.

Everything hurts. His memories and his body and his mind. Orb-Weaver and Dream-Stealer hover over him, smear strange and putrid paste of green-lavender into his wound, but it doesn’t help.

James thrashes, bucks against them, screams into the dark sky.

He’s begging. He wants them to end it. His life, the pain, whichever. Ta is there suddenly, hand hovering above him, trying to shove that liquidy-silver feeling into him.

“What’s wrong?” Clint asks.

“I don’t know!” Ta answers brusquely, head tilted towards Clint. “We’ve never kept one this long.”

Dream-Stealer appears. “It’s not being here, that causes him pain, not exactly. He’s… he’s lost. Lonely. Missing too many things.”

Orb-Weaver dances up. “You left him too long, Clint. You can’t just mark one of them and then abandon them.” His fingers glow, spelling the words out.

“I didn’t mark him!” Clint exclaims.

Ta gives him a sharp look, “You kind of did, Clint.”

James watches, half aware as the man’s whole body flushes red. “Well I didn’t mean to.”

“How?” James asks. His tongue feels thick, head stuffed full of potato-sacks.

Four heads turn on him. “How what?”

“How’d ‘e mark me?”

Ta smiles at him, more a leer than a grin. “He fed you, willingly and with no strings attached.”

James frowns. “All of you have fed me though.”

Ta nods, “Yes, but Clint fed you first, marked you, and made sure his name was spoken in your presence. He _marked_ you. And we might be thieves of a sort, but we don’t steal from each other.”

Someone jostled Ta, who shrugs. “Well, we don’t steal things that are important to each other, anyway.”

James frowns. “Unmark me.”

Orb-Weaver shrugs. “No can do, Bucky Barr. Once marked…”

“You can’t just,” James says, but then he’s gasping, feels like the air is being sucked straight from his lungs. “I’m not some _pet,_ ” he spits.

Clint looks at him, hard. He moves his hands, stupid kalidescope images that always move to fast. The others answer in kind, a whole technicolor conversation happening around him that he can’t translate and it makes him angry. Makes him forget the burning, empty pain. “Can’t you all just _speak_ to me?”

They vanish, leaving him alone in a clearing that’s completely empty and abandoned. Save for one shadowy figure. The man with the living skin approaches him. He grasps James’ empty _screams_ at the molten, heavy sensation that pours from his mangled shoulder.

When he blinks, and the man is gone, he feels, for the first time since he fell through a ring of fungus, perfectly balanced.

He glances down, twist an arm that looks like liquid silver, and whispers, “Bucky.”

—

Bucky stalks through the woods, half-starved and mad. His silver arm is nifty, good at a lot of things, and preternaturally strong. But he doesn’t know where he is, or where Clint has gone, or how to get back.

He stumbled into a city, once, and it was all wrong. It felt like a place he should have known, tall brick buildings and soot-lined streets. But the people, the vehicles, everything was _wrong_. He stumbled right back into the forest, looking for rolling green and jagged cliff edges.

He’s looking for a ring of mushrooms, lopsided and off balance.

—

Bucky learns to hunt. Small animals, little forest creatures that make his stomach ache when he peels the skin back and cooks the meat over smouldering leaves. The world is off balance. He can’t figure out how to make the days stretch, and too soon it’s winter.

His hair hangs in his face, his beard matted with dirt and rubble and his shoulder hates the cold.

The longer he rambles alone in the woods, the more everything feels like a dream. Not just the clearing, or the ring of mushrooms, but the war, and Brooklynn.

Everything he’s ever known beyond a silver-liquid arm and a forest with no end.

—

The Forest has pockets, despite not having and end. Pockets where Bucky falls into cities he might half-recognize.

Once he falls right into a bar in Paris and the _first thing_ Bucky does is slink to the back, looking for the stew that makes the sound heavy and the color bitter.

The kitchen gleams silver and everyone stares at him, eyes wide. Buck slumps backwards, against a door that isn’t wood.

He tries to croak something out, words he half-understands. Someone hands him a glass of water, clear, funny tasting. Warm, despite the chunks of ice in it.

“Where?” He asks.

Someone answers, and Bucky is reminded he doesn’t speak French. He storms out, but beyond the kitchen door is just _wood._

Bucky sinks to his knees, digs silver fingers into wet earth. He cries, finally.

Cries for a war he never wanted to fight, and the brothers he lost. Cries for his arm, and his home, and everything he’s given up in a mad quest for a creature that might not exist.

Somewhere in the haze of his dreamy memories, he remembers something. “Please,” he begs.

“Please, Clint.”

The wind howls, and the night slinks in exhausted, and Bucky finds himself a pile of leaves to rest on, hair tied back with string he’s not sure where he found.

—

Bucky wakes up, and there’s a hand clamped tight over his mouth, living-moss eyes gleaming in the dark. “You fool,” Ta seethes in his ear. “He tried to set you _free._ ” Ta looks around them. In the glow of the moon, Bucky can see deep rings beneath those eyes, a guanteness to Ta’s cheeks that takes away some of the ethereal beauty.

“Humans,” Ta spits. “Meddling with things they know nothing about. How’d you even manage the forest?”

Bucky frowns. “Where is Clint?”  
Ta spits at him. “Stop using his name, you idiot.”

“Should I not say your name either, Ta?” Bucky sneers.

The grin he gets is most definitely not human, lips stretched too far and teeth long and razor-edged. “Is that really what you think my name is? You aren’t the only one who knows how to bend the truth, _James_ ,” Ta hisses. The world tilts, takes Bucky with it, twist him inside out and burns through him.

He grinds his teeth, fits a silver hand around a delicate wrist, and squeezes. “My name is Bucky. Now where is Clint?”

Ta lets him go, sinks back onto their heels with a sigh. “You’ve done it now, Little Soldier. They’ll burn us all for this.”

“For what?” Bucky asks.

Ta scratches sharp nails down his silver arm, and the sensation makes him shudder. “You said once, when you were dreaming, that our ring wasn’t a ring. It was an oval.”

Bucky doesn’t remember saying that _out loud,_ but he knows the Memory-Stealer liked to play in his head while he slept.

“Did you ever think to ask about that? About _us?_ ” Ta hisses.

“Of course I did,” Bucky answers. “But it seemed impolite.

The answer throws Ta off balance, makes laughter, high and windy fall around them. “Impolite? Boy you were half dead and bleeding out and worried about being _impolite._ ” Ta sighs, sits cross legged, and begins the dancing finger-speak. “Our circle was broken because we were,” Ta hesitates, trying to find the words even as dreamy versions of Ta and Clint and their clan dance around Bucky. “Clint had another name once, all of our clan did. He was an archer, and a damned good one.”

“And you?” Bucky interrupts.

“Shush,” Ta chides, making the light-Clint dance through the trees, arrows singing before they evaporate, whistling loud. “Clint never was very good though, at obeying the rules. At leaving your kind alone. And the Court, they don’t like those of us who meddle.”

Bucky remembers the mangled flesh of Clint’s ears. “His own people carved up his ears?”

Ta nods. “His own _family,_ Bucky. They couldn’t have the next in line rolling about and playing with _you_.”

Bucky watches light-Clint struggle against moon-chains, hears the echoes of his screams.

“He took a name,” Ta says, and Bucky watches as another figure is dragged into the scene. “Someone he met. Not a soldier like you, but just a kid. A boy who had needed protection.”

Bucky shuts his eyes against the red spilling from the golden glow. “He took a human name, made it his own, and took his exile with honor, his chin held high.”

Little shadow figures follow light-Clint into the woods, a handful of dim glows that Bucky fingers absently. One of them hovers, and he reaches for it. “Dream-Stealer,” he watches the shadows, waits for the one who makes the light web in orbs that speak. “Orb-Weaver, now where’s the one with the skin that moves?” He asks quiet.

“Clint was well liked by some. And when he was disinherited, we followed, each of us bearing our own kind of burden. Each of us stripped of our name, and given something _mortal,_ ” Ta says in lui of answer. “Wanda, who left her brother behind and who once could do more than move memories about.”

The light shapes itself into an emerald glow, Dream-Stealer tapping someone's head and altering the flow of their thoughts.

“Peter, who had no family left but Clint, and who would’ve been a beautiful, enchanting, _seductive_ dancer,” Ta smiles at him. “He’d have lured many of you beyond the fairy-rings.”

“Tony, with his brilliant mind. He could manipulate your materials and ours, so they _remade him_ from your metals.”

Bucky looks at Ta, asks again, “And you?”

The lights shift, and Bucky doesn’t exactly know how he knows it, but someone else’s finger-speak joins Ta. There’s a girl, beautiful, delicate, hair spun like gold and features dainty. She’s lethal as she moves, as good with a knife as Clint is with an arrow. “They gave her the name Natasha, and then stole everything from her. Her home, her family, everything”

The golden-fae is running, falls to her knees and writhes and Bucky can see, even in the shadowy light, the way her features contorted. Her whole body shifting and arching, gold-hair turning a rusty red. He cannot hear the light, but he imagines the screams and his fingers reach out to… he wants to comfort her but there’s nothing. The light dissipates beneath his fingers, falls to the floor as ashy-dust.

Ta says, “They cannot strip us entirely of what we are, but they can break the parts of us that made us most useful.”

Clint circles around and he looks thin, so very thin, so very bruised and Bucky feels more than hears his whine. He reaches towards him with the silver hand, instinct telling him it will help. Clint side steps him easy.

“You should have gone home a long time ago, James Barnes,” Clint says. There’s a heavy exhaustion in him. “Why didn’t you go _home_.”

Bucky shrugs. “I don’t know where that is, anymore.”

—

Ta and Clint linger at the edges of Bucky’s world. As best he can tell, they are alone, sitting together in a defeated huddle. Bucky takes to making food, whatever he can catch mixed with whatever roots he can scrounge up. They don’t talk, so he does.

“I tried, for a while. I ran in circles about this fuckin’ forest. Always ended up somewhere I thought I knew, but it wasn’t every right,” he says. “Once I thought I’d made it home, back to Brooklynn. An’ the air,” he pauses, inhaling deeply. “It smelled like soot and smoke and street, and Ma was there, but it wasn’t,” he pauses, remembering how the world had bent. How the cars had been all wrong and the streets reordered.

“Then I went to Paris. To a little club I knew. Only it’s gone now,” and he feels a real pang of sorrow at that one. “They had a uh, ‘special soup’, and I was thinkin’,” he blushes, “was thinkin’ if I could get some it might be just like a fairy ring, you know?”

Sometimes they’re all quiet, and Ta disappears. Bucky sits real close to Clint then, close enough to feel his warmth, and sometimes, his skin.

They sleep, back to back, and wake, wrapped around each other. “I looked for you guys. I don’t know for how long, but I looked, hard.”

“Tony never should’ve given you that arm,” Clint says to him, quiet. Bucky clutches the liquid-silver skin, afraid. Clint waves a hand. “We won’t take it back, but he forgot what they did to him. Used to be he could fix human-folk and they’d think it was just a fever dream. But now he is of us and of you and when he fixed you, he mixed us into you. Now you are like us. Not them. Not human. Not fae.”

“Cursed,” Ta adds. “Neither here nor there, and forgotten.”

“What does that mean for me?” Bucky asks quietly. Clint doesn’t hear him, and Bucky isn’t turned towards him. Ta finger-speaks the question and Clint shrugs.

“I wish I knew, Little Soldier, I wish I knew.”

—

Eventually Tony and Peter and Wanda make their appearance. Others comeforwad. One named Sam, who flies on broken wings. Bucky can’t help but grin. “I knew some of you had wings!”

Sam scoffs, but he claps Bucky on his silver arm and says, “I can take you up sometime.”

Bucky declares Sam his favorite and the two take to stalking through the tree-tops, Bucky using the training of a sniper and Rhodey the magic of impossible creatures.

He uses the time to study the endless forest.

Peter watches him with keen eyes, sharp and unblinking. “You think you can fix the curse.”

“‘S not a curse, Pete,” Bucky says. “It’s a punishment.”

Peter shrugs. “It makes no difference. This is our fate now.”

Bucky shrugs. “Fates change,” and he wiggles his silver fingers.

But the truth is, he’s thinking about a bomb that blew and a heart that shouldn’t beat. He’s thinking about belief and superstition and rings of mushroom that seemed innocuous, and still could frighten ordinary people.

He watches a band of people with borrowed names, and thinks to a moment in the forest, bowed on his knees when he made a _choice_.

—

Bucky kisses Clint first, in a move that shokes their whole clan. It might be spring in the forest, (it’s hard to tell) and Clint is leaning into him, that exhausting slump to his shoulders he’s worn since he came back to Bucky.

Peter is laughing, dancing, Tony chasing him as Peter flits between the branches, every bit the mythical creature he once was.

He’s not sure what inspires him to do it, except that Clint’s eyes are half-lidded and his lips soft looking. Bucky was content, felt like he’d found a home for the first time since he left the sooty-streets of his childhood, and he made a decision. He tilted Clint’s face up, knowing the golden-hay man would expect _words_ and he kissed him, soft and chaste and gentle.

Clint frowns, “What’s that for?”

Bucky shrugs, a small smile tugging at his lips. “You looked like you could use one.”

Clint ponders this, and then leans in, capturing Bucky’s lips. Behind them, laughter and whistles ring in the air, and Bucky raises a finger he doubts they understand.

Clint taste like cinnamon and earth, a taste that shouldn’t be pleasant but is. And his lips are extremely soft beneath Bucky’s, his jaw smooth beneath Bucky’s ragged beard. Clint tangles his hands in the long braid Bucky has taken to wearing, and Bucky carefully ghost his fingers over mangled, pointed ears.

“Tell me, you impossible creature,” Bucky says, intent and serious, “What is your name?”

Clint opens his mouth to argue, but Bucky shakes his head. “What is the name you _claim?”_

Clint doesn’t answer, not immediately. Bucky can see the war in his eyes. The desire to take something stolen from him, the need to claim the choices he made.

“When you are ready then,” Bucky declares. He leaves Clint beneath the branches, a cruel reversal of all that time ago.

Peter’s laughter rings the loudest and he hollers, “A gift, Little Soldier?”

Bucky glances at him, “One willingly given, if you’ll only take it.”

The laughter ends abruptly, his words hanging heavy in the air.

—

Tony finds him first. “You mean for us to take our borrowed names the way you twisted your own.”

Bucky shrugs. “A rose by any other name,” He says.

Tony narrows his eyes. “It can’t be that simple.”

“Sure it can. Isn’t that how you lot trick us? Make a thing seem like so much more than it is?”  Bucky asks. He twists his fingers over a flame, watches the light refracts in them. “All herbs and magic tricks and we fall over ourselves confused. You say you own us, and we think, you’re faster, stronger, _prettier,_ ” he half teases, “so we stay until you grow bored.”

Tony ponders it, skin rippling and twisting and moulding itself on his bones.

“Own it, Tony,” Bucky says.

Tony shuts his eyes, stretches out his arms and the gold and red shape itself like armor, tethered to the blue glow in the center of his chest. Someone gasps behind them, and Peter appears, eyes glowing as he touches Tony’s hear-glow. “It’s beautiful,” the boy whispers.

“And you, little Orb-Weaver, with your sticky light, what do you hide?” Bucky asks.

Peter stares, spreads his fingers and makes the light fracture, shape itself, spin out in a netting so fine it could be silver thread.

“What does it do?” Bucky asks.

Peter throws it, and they all watch with glee as it catches, tugs the leaves from the branches. “I’ll have to call you Little Spider now,” Bucky laughs.

Peter frowns, kicks at his ankles and says, “You’ll always be the Little Soldier.”

Sam is easy. His metal wings were a part of him long before his exile, and make them _truly_ a part of his skin isn’t hard.

Bucky watches Wanda with a frown and Peter says, “She doesn’t care about her gifts.”

“I know, but as far as I am aware, none of us can convince her brother to join us,” Bucky taps his silver fingers. “Did he choose to stay or…?”

Peter says, “He did, but only because he had to save her.”

“Then we steal him back.”

Peter looks at him, eyes narrowed. “That simple?”

“That simple,” Bucky answers. He stands, makes his way to Ta and Clint, pokes at the stew they’re making. “Are you ever going to teach me to cook?” He asks.

Clint eyes him warily. “You can do a lot of things very well, Bucky, but don’t you ever try cooking for us again.”

Bucky laughs, accepts the bite he’s offered, then tugs at Ta’s wrist. “Walk with me,” he says.

—

Ta is as graceful as the light was when the story was shown to him. And he can see it now, the softness about her hips, the gentlest curve about her waist. “What was your role in the Court?”

Ta’s head tilts. “You might call me a uhm,” Ta struggles for the word. “One who leads the guard. Captain, but I think our Captain is higher than yours. An assassin, a spy, perhaps.”

“Did you like it?” He asks.

“Absolutely. I was the first of the ladies to ever achieve that ranking,” Ta says, and it comes out desperate and wistful. “I was the best at it, better even than Clint, and one day I would have guarded his throne and lead his armies.”

“And now?” Bucky prods gently.

“Now I am nothing, a broken shell of who I was with a name I did not ask for,” Ta says.

Bucky shrugs. “Can you still fight like you could? Can you still seduce them onto your blade?”

Ta looks at him with a frown. “I suppose,” Ta answers slowly.

“And haven’t you chosen ‘Ta’ for yourself?”

“Yes.” Ta answers, firmer this time.

“That,” he waves his hands at a flat chest, at pants that fit strangely. “That’s just adornment anyway. Are you afraid you won’t find…” he hesitates on the word.

“Who wants this?” Ta asks.

Bucky smiles, half a million memories away in a bar on the Northern Shore of Ireland. “You’d be surprised, Ta, how many there are who care very little about what hides beneath your leathers. You are who you say you are. _What_ you say you are.”

“Then I am Ta, Captain of the Guard for Clint, proper heir to the throne of the Court,” Ta answers. Bucky shakes his head.

“You are Ta, Captain of the Guard for Clint. You are a master assassin, a spy, a _thief of sorts_ , but we are not going to inherit a Court, Ta. We are going to _build_ one,” Bucky announces. He grins, something bouncing in his head. “It’s the American way, you know.”

Ta gives him a soft smile and it’s delicate, _feminine_ , but he thinks Ta already knows that.

—

Clint finds him while the others sleep. “I heard the Soldier who fell through our ring on _accident_ is planning some kind of coup to rescue a boy he’s never met,” Clint hisses.

Bucky grins at him, and he wonders if maybe Tony’s magic isn’t changing him a little from the inside out, because Clint steps back like his grin is sharp and feral. “I picked that ring to stand by, you know.”

“You can’t do this, Bucky. You don’t know their _power_ ,” Clint snarls.

Bucky shrugs. “I was a grunt sniper in a small army fighting next to an ashtmatic from a poor neighborhood. Our group? We weren’t really ever gonna make it home, not all of us, not most of us. But we were scrappy, good at fighting bigger, badder, _meaner_ guys. The trick is to know your strengths, and your weaknesses, and not let them figure out either.”

Clint frowns, eyes trained on Bucky’s mouth. He moves his fingers and the thought sings in Bucky’s head. “And you think we can do something like this? Win a battle?”

Bucky nods, “Maybe. But We need a leader, one who is sure of himself, his motives. Of who he is. So I ask you, what name do you _claim_?”

Clint studies him, then stands and holds his hands out. He helps Bucky ups, wraps him in a tight hug that doesn’t feel like the ones he used to share with Steve. When he pulls back, he doesn’t let go of Bucky’s silver hand. “I am Clint, leader of the clan of the broken ring.”

There’s nothing really dramatic about Clint’s announcement, no shifting of his appearance, no screaming of the wind, no shuddering of the earth. But Bucky can see the others heads turn, can feel the intensity of their gazes.

Bucky can feel the declaration inside of his chest. Ta kneels, one knee to the ground, arms down her side. Peter and Tony, Sam, they all follow her lead. Wanda doesn’t kneel, not exactly but she hovers above the earth and her eyes are gentle, not haunted.

Bucky grins. “C’mon, kids, we’ve got a brother to steal.”

—

It’s surprisingly _easy_ to steal Pietro. Almost disappointingly so. Peter eyes Ta and Bucky and Clint with disdain, muttering about bloodlust and soldiers and Bucky just shrugs.

“Know your strengths, know your weaknesses, never let the enemy figure it out,” Bucky says.

Their strengths were being invisible, in bending light so they could move in the shadows. In being broken and overlooked and possessing enormous talents that might have seemed silly to those with no imagination.

But also, in knowing the names of their enemies while their own were kept close to their hearts.

“Names,” Bucky says, “are funny things.”

Clint laughs, and they run back to a forest that never ends, speed bursting as Pietro brushes against their skin.

“It’s easy to burn a castle to the ground when all you need is to whisper a name,” Clint agrees.

—

Sometimes, Bucky remembers mud and trenches and a rain of bullets. He remembers an ashtmatic blond and a snarky best friend and a grey haired woman and a sister who wept when he left.

Sometimes he misses it, misses them. But he doesn’t miss crowded streets or explosions or the ash that used to clog his throat always.

He spends his days in a forest that never ends, but has strange pockets that resemble the cities he used to haunt.

There’s a band of broken creatures who rule the endless forest. Somewhere, around a centuries old oval of rotten fungus, people whisper about the strange creatures who rescue broken toys, and only return the ones they can fix. They talk about how the leader, a gold-spun thing with carved up ears who once burned a whole kingdom to the ground by whispering a name in the king’s ears.

Bucky spends his nights next to the gold-spun ruler. Sometimes, he’s beneath him, sometimes he’s over him, but always he ends beside him.

“Do you miss it?” Clint asks him quietly one day.

“Hmm?” Bucky hums. Clint taps his throat, letting Bucky know he heard it.

“Do you miss your old life, your old people?”

Bucky shrugs. “I like what I have here, Clint. I would like to know how they turned out, but I wouldn’t give all of this up.”

Clint threads his fingers through a silver hand. “Even for the flesh back?”

Bucky laughs, “Man, this thing is so much better than flesh.”

Clint nods, nips at his throat. “I have a gift for you, Little Soldier.”

Bucky raises a brow.

“Two, actually,” Clint amends. “One of them comes from the customs of your people.” He presses something into Bucky’s hand. His human hand, and buck glances down at the little band. It’s made out of black stone, that looks like liquid when the light catches it. “We have bonding ceremonies. Usually they’re mutually agreed upon arrangements, but I understand your kind have this thing about _asking_.” Clint curls his nose. “Such a weird custom, you know. Why would you need to ask if you know they’re the one for you?”

Bucky laughs, kisses Clint hard before he can go on. “It’s _polite_ Clint, to ask and not assume.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “Well?”

And Bucky sighs. “I mean, you never actually asked, but yeah, I’ll bond with you or whatever you call it.”

Clint grins, eyes bright and he tackles Bucky into the earth and they aren’t quite, running the rest of their clan off for a few hours.

“I believe,” Bucky says later, when the stars are bright and he’s resting his head on Clint’s chest. “I believe you had another gift for me?”

Clint grins. “We’ll need Wanda for that one,” and he whistles.

Wanda hovers above them suddenly, and Bucky starts, nearly elbowing Clint in the nose. “That’s never not creepy, Wanda.”

She just smiles, and presses the tips of her fingers to Bucky’s temples. In flickers and fractures, he watches his Ma grow old beside his sister. His sister marries a kind man, has a few kids. He watches Steve and Rhodey disappear once the battle is over and he sees them in a little bungalow on a rolling green hill next to a jagged cliff edge.

It breaks him, a little, watching them grieve. It’s better this way, though. He knows this. Knows turning up now would just stir up old wounds and split old trauma.

Some of him wants to ask Wanda is it real, or if it’s just wishful illusion.

He doesn’t ask.

Bucky believes there’s a lot of power in knowledge, and even more in knowing when you just don’t need to know something.


End file.
